Modular Houses Quick, Affordable in City Renewal

Modular Houses Quick, Affordable in City Renewal

Article excerpt

attempt to fill a need for affordable urban housing, community
groups and local officials around the country are turning to
factory-built housing in the hope of creating instant neighborhoods
on vacant city land.

The houses are built on assembly lines, with plumbing, carpeting
and all, and are then shipped in two or three parts to be assembled
at the building site.

Until recently, these modular houses have been found mostly in
suburban and rural areas, where open expanses of land and shortages
of skilled labor have made them financially attractive to private
developers.

Now, in the face of declining federal support for housing
programs, a growing number of groups are banking that housing costs
in urban areas can be cut by the innovative use of houses that can
go straight from the assembly line to vacant lots, often
tax-delinquent land that has been taken over by the city.

Such houses can be manufactured for as little as $50,000, and,
with public subsidies and low-interest loans, can be bought for even
less.

One experiment is under way in Baltimore, where, as in many
other cities, the demand for affordable housing far outstrips the
supply. There is an inventory of some 5,200 boarded-up houses unfit
for habitation and a waiting list of some 37,000 applicants for
public housing.

Ten low-income families are living in a row of new townhouses,
each built out of two modular units, stacked one atop the other, on
what only four months ago was a weed-strewn field in a blighted area
on the city's West Side not far from downtown.

The three-bedroom, two-bath townhouses are the first of 171
being constructed as a pilot project by the Enterprise Foundation of
Columbia, Md., a nonprofit organization involved in housing issues.

``Is modular housing the magic solution?'' asked Lee Rosenberg,
a local builder working with the Enterprise Foundation. ``No, but
when combined with subsidies and help on the financing, it does
offer a way for groups without the expertise to put up housing
quickly.''

Less than a mile away, Willard Hackerman, a private contractor,
is renovating nine abandoned 19th-century rowhouses by installing
complete, factory-built floors of rooms into the gutted shells of
the buildings, which the city provided free.

Workers began to prepare the buildings for renovation in
September, and a crane dropped the first factory-built units into
place on Nov. 10. Two weeks later, the first family moved in.

Hackerman admits that the project is an experiment, to see if
the economics make sense. If it works, he says, he hopes to do up to
1,000 houses a year, taking advantages of existing state tax breaks,
low-interest mortgages and land the city donated in an effort to
solve its housing problems.

In New York City, which began introducing modular housing in
1981, more than 1,500 houses have been assembled over the last five
years.

Public and private coalitions involved in the construction of
moderate-priced housing hope to add 800 to 1,000 modular units
annually, a rate that would account for one out of every five new
low-rise residential units in the city.

Low-income demonstration projects involving factory-built
housing are also under way in Boston, Newark, and Philadelphia.

In addition, public officials in New York and Chicago are
exploring the possibility of locating modular housing factories in
their cities, projects that would provide a steady supply of housing
and jobs for inner city workers. Virtually all such factories are
now in rural areas, close to their primary markets.

The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs also wants to
find a manufacturer who will build and operate a plant to produce
modular units for subsidized and low-income and moderate-income
housing.

Nationally, more than 93,000 modular houses were built in 1987,
accounting for about 6 percent of the new housing starts, said James
Birdsong, of the National Association of Home Builders. …